George W. Bush

Israeli student Rotem Bides has generated a major controversy after allegedly stealing items from the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site in Poland for an artwork. The university has since cancelled the exhibition, and Bides may face prosecution from Poland as well as disciplinary action from the school. [The New York Times]

The Roddenberry Foundation is giving out 20 fellowships worth $50,000 each to activists fighting to make the world a little more like Star Trek. You can apply for projects related to civil rights, climate change and environmental justice, immigration and refugee rights, or LGBTQIA and women’s rights. Hurry, applications close on July 25th! [The Roddenberry Fellowship]

Whoa. Keanu Reeves is partnering with artists to launch X Artists’ Books, a new publishing platform that will focus on “unconventional, interdisciplinary and collaborative” print projects. [Los Angeles Times]

The conservative Steamboat Conference is going to feature a one day pop-up exhibition of George W. Bush’s paintings in Colorado. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about this beyond the fact that I never miss an opportunity to bring up GEORGE EFFING BUSH’S WEIRD PAINTINGS. [artnet News]

The final U.S. iteration of Now Be Here, the photography project that documents thousands of women in the arts at the same time, will take place at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. The project is a collaboration between the NMWA, LA-based artist Kim Schoenstadt, and D.C.-based artist Linn Meyers. Female-identifying artists, curators, and gallerists in the DC/Baltimore metropolitan region are invited to participate, and can register here. [Google Forms]

Police in Spain have recovered three out of five Francis Bacon paintings (valued at nearly $30 million) stolen in Madrid in 2015. They managed to track down the photographer who took photos of the stolen paintings when the images appeared on the market. The case is considered Spain’s largest ever contemporary art heist. [BBC]

Those calling for the censorship of Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket” will be happy to know that the painting has been removed from view. They’ll likely be disappointed to know it’s for a logistical reason as boring as a water leak. The real story here seems to be that the museum’s brand-spanking-new downtown digs is taking on water. Cue the Titanic/iceberg jokes. [Hyperallergic]

Melania Trump’s official White House portrait is here, and it kinda looks like she’s an out-of-focus hologram. The internet is having lots of fun with this one. [New York Magazine]

A cast believed by some to be from a long-lost Degas mold will go on view in London. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, Sotheby’s just proved Basquiats are hot commodities no matter the continent. Expect to see more of his work heading to Asian private collections. [The Telegraph]

Artist and blogger Greg Allen has started a Kickstarter project, OurGuernica, After Our Picasso. The purpose of this initiative: raising funds to commission an anonymous Chinese artist to paint Angela Merkel giving Ivanka Trump side-eye (photo above) in the style of former-president-now-painter George W. Bush. That’s a lot of layers to unpack for what is essentially a meme. [Artspace]

This sounds like so much fun. The Museum of Sex has opened a fully-functional pop-up disco bar for their exhibition of Bill Bernstein’s New York nightlife photos. [The New York Times]

According to Mark Hudson, the Tate Britain’s Queer British Art 1861-1967 “begs the question of whether we’re in for art that tells the story of homosexuality in Britain over the 150 years leading up to the legal landmark, or art by artists who just happen to be gay. Judging by the first room, devoted to the late 19th century Aesthetic Movement, the exhibition might have been better titled Screamingly Camp Art.” Sounds like a missed opportunity all-around. [The Telegraph]

Bad news (for those of us prone to soul-crushing fair fatigue): Brooklyn is getting a Frieze Week art fair. The good news: it will be an off-shoot of SPRING/BREAK, focused on large-scale public installations and environments. SPRING/BREAK is one of the only fairs we can can handle more of. [artnet News]

Snøhetta’s Lascaux IV Caves Museum in southern France is open and looks (as expected) like an anthropology museum from the future. Their treatment of the cave painting reproductions is a really interesting display strategy. For preservation reasons, you can’t visit the real thing, but the museum has managed hyper-accurate reproductions that never try to trick you into thinking they’re the originals. [Dezeen]

Joshua David Stein grapples with the uncomfortable weirdness of George W. Bush’s painting career. Bush’s latest artistic endeavor, a monograph of portraits he’s painted of disabled veterans, is especially complicated: “Bush became a painter and his subjects were the very men torn to shreds, quite literally, by his own policy.” It feels so wrong to admit that at least the one image from the series is really compelling. [The Guardian]

Neighbors for More Neighbors, a project from artists Ryan Johnson and John Edwards, is part of the growing YIMBY movement. The crux of YIMBYism is that decades of NIMBY concerns over density and new development have made cities ridiculously expensive by restricting supply of real estate. The basic logic behind this argument is that downzoning or blocking building height increases drives up the cost of living—when neighbors oppose rezoning for taller buildings which usually include affordable housing, for example, all that gets built are less dense luxury condos for the few. Comparing the respective housing situations in booming cities such as Denver and San Francisco is a good case study in this theory. [Curbed]

We all knew the art market was top-heavy, but this is ridiculous. Andrew Fabricant, director of Richard Gray Gallery, claims that two Asian collectors are pretty much single-handedly propping up the auction market. [Observer]

Wow. Nate Freeman has written the definitive guide to Ivanka Trump’s art world involvements—from her supporters’ death threats against Halt Action Group artists to the Trump team’s numerous connections with Artsy. This is a good read. [ARTnews]

Speaking of (in)famous people’s offspring, this has to be the weirdest all-star, multigenerational collaboration by children of celebrities. Apparently Carrie Fisher and Sean Lennon wrote a song together, which Lennon recorded with Willow Smith as a tribute following the actress’s death. [E Online]

The Gardiner Museum in Toronto is hiring a chief curator. If you have eight years of curating experience working in the field of ceramics and a PHD, this could be a job for you. [Work in Culture]

Watching the Republicans try to come up with (and pass) an Affordable Care Act repeal-and-replace plan is like a room full of monkeys with typewriters, if the monkeys had just smashed the typewriters and then were frustratedly trying to jam all the pieces back together into something that resembled a typewriter. [The Washington Post]

Ronald Hollar drunk-drove his car into “Spectral Liberation”, a beloved piece of decades-old public art in Des Moines, Iowa. It’s estimated he caused nearly a quarter of $1 million in damage. [KCII]

Billionaire Dan Gilbert moved his company, Quicken Loans, to Detroit and commissioned a few public art projects to help “beautify” the city. What a hero. It seems the point of this article, if there is one at all, is to point out that Gilbert believes artists play a role in rejuvenating (read gentrifying) cities. None of Gilbert’s projects are even discussed though. We’re genuinely confused about why this article even exists. [Forbes]

Ooooh. Giovanni Garci-Fenech interviews Martin Herbert on his new book about artists who leave the art world. [Hyperallergic]

I’ll be on Radio Free Brooklyn talking to Dr. Lisa today between 2-3. Phone in and talk to us! (718) 928-9732 [Radio Free Brooklyn]

George W. Bush is releasing a book of his paintings February 28, 2017. He’s only a marginally better painter than he was president, which is to say he’s terrible. Don’t buy the book. [Time]

Koen Vanmechelen has been breeding chickens for the last 20 years as part of an art piece called “Cosmopolitan Chicken Project”. In order to illustrate metaphorical ideas about diversity and multiculturalism, he created a super breed of chicken by using a diverse breeding pool. This chicken is healthier, lives longer, and adapts more easily to change. And it’s art, which means these chickens are available to collectors for purchase. [Smithsonian]

“Contemporary art at its worst is rarely so naive as contemporary architecture at its best,” begins a review of the Venice Biennale by Ian Volner. He claims this is because architects sometimes confuse design with power and that architecture is politics—a misunderstanding he sees as afflicting the Biennale. [ArtForum]

Vessel (a temporary name) by British designer Thomas Heatherwick is a 100 million public art work that will adorn the Hudson Yards. The design has been unveiled and it looks like giant glassware. [Gothamist]

Pokemon Go has taken the world by storm over the last few days and it seems like a good moment to reflect on the simpler times. A time when smart phones weren’t ubiquitous, hope was on the horizon and one of the dumbest people in history was President of the United States. On December 18, 2008, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi became an international hero by throwing his shoes at the President during a press conference. If only those shoes had been Poké Balls. Seeing Dubya fight it out with a Squirtle in arena combat would almost make it all worth it.

In San Francisco, a 6-foot-tall dolphin sculpture falls on a 2-year-old boy and he dies. Public service announcement: Don’t let your kids climb on a sculpture at an art gallery called Friday Majestic Collection Art Gallery. [Boston.com]

Art critic Ben Davis writes about Twitch, a massively popular website where you can watch and chat with people playing video games. In Ben Davis fashion, we get reminded of the constant political fact that popular entertainment is awful: “…video games, which are, after all, commercial products, precision-engineered instruments of distraction.” [New York Magazine]

Chicago’s been big on social practice art for some time, and now more of the city’s universities are catching on. The University of Illinois at Chicago has hired artist Laurie Jo Reynolds to become the school’s first-ever assistant professor of public arts, social justice, and culture. [Newcity Art]

This is not okay: James Franco has been caught slut-shaming Lindsay Lohan. He published a short story on VICE on how he definitely did not sleep with this “damaged” starlet. [MTV]

A new study by the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts shows that people consistently prefer art that is authored by one rather than multiple artists. Apparentlytwo isn’t better than one. [Hyperallergic]

Guccifer, the hacker who leaked former president George W. Bush’s nude self portraits, is being sentenced to four years in prison [Gawker]

Painter Ben Shattuck worked with Sandra Harmel, a historian based in Iowa to find locations that were recorded as being part of the underground railroad. Based on that research, he’s produced a remarkably cliché and academic body of work that got a write up in the New Yorker. [The New Yorker]

An interview with Los Angeles-based painter Noam Rappaport. The interview most concerns itself with the minutia of process, yet somehow it never gets tedious. [Artspace]

Why do they exist? Why are they being exhibited? How are they being used and discussed? Why do they matter?

I think the simplest answer for why George W. Bush started painting is because he has nothing else to do. Bush is toxic and unemployable as a political figure. He can’t campaign for Republicans, can’t talk on television about anything important, can’t give speeches for money, can’t write memoirs, can’t travel to certain countries where he runs the hypothetical risk of getting arrested for war crimes. Painting is a harmless and respectable pursuit that offers an aura of cultured acceptability….

This is as good a time as any to point out that Bush painted his portraits, not just from photographs–a common enough practice as well as a long-established contemporary, conceptual strategy, though I think only the former pertains here–but from the top search result on Google Images. Many photos were taken from the subject’s Wikipedia entry. Bush based his paintings on the literally first-to-surface, easiest-to-find photos of his subjects.

Is this meaningful in any way? If he had one, it would mean Bush’s studio assistant is very, very lazy. [Greg.org]

Maybe we would talk more about Bush’s record if we called that art, too. Allen continues:

Ironically, there is even more important art buried within the Senate’s trove of classified CIA documents. And as Bush was being interviewed by his daughter on NBC, these other artworks were still being actively suppressed. Jason Leopold and Al Jazeera reported that the Senate report contains detailed sketches of waterboarding by Abu Zubaydah, a senior Al Qaeda leader imprisoned at Guantanamo….Since the CIA illegally destroyed its own waterboarding videotapes in 2005, these drawings may be the most powerful visual evidence of the torture regime we have left. [Greg.org]

Koch Industries may hold the most net acreage in leases of the Canadian oil sands, which means they’d have the most to gain from the Keystone Pipeline. Time to stop buying Angel Soft toilet paper, I guess. [Washington Post]

George W. Bush: still a painter. He plans to move beyond the dog, landscape, and self-portrait genres; he now wants to paint “world leaders.” [The New York Times]

A website that recreates the Super Mario Bros. video game from open-source software has been taken down; Nintendo wants the site taken down, it must “protect against infringement of our intellectual property rights.” [The Washington Post]

According to a new formal complaint by former Knoedler & Company gallery clients, an artist going by the nickname of “Tommy Cha Cha” may have been the first “known purveyor in forged art” to do business with the gallery. [The New York Times]

President Obama, now a blogger on HuffPo. Well, kinda. He penned an op-ed urging congress to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. [Politico]

Patti Smith eulogizes Lou Reed, calling him “our generation’s New York poet, championing its misfits as Whitman had championed its workingman and Lorca its persecuted.” [The New Yorker]

Leonardo DiCaprio, will you please come to our benefit? Another DiCaprio-attended fundraiser nets millions! This time for LACMA. [The L.A. Times]